Thursday, August 11, 2005

Opening OpenSolaris; ubuntu, openSUSE vs. Fedora; yahoo.

Jonathan Schwartz seems to want to get on the right side of open source folk (at last - left hand and right hand working together). OK so opensolaris needs open source geeks to flock to its aid or opening it will have been much of a waste of energy, but the olive branch gesture and the potential to work with OSDL is nice touch. Nice one, Jonathan.

Ubuntu recently announced that they would be offering enterprise support for their distro (as I predicted) . Novell have opened up all of Suse at opensuse.org. Now the difference between these two and Red Hat is that you can download and use the actual commercial version for free. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat, do not allow a binary download of RHEL itself for free. Instead they offer Fedora Core which is nearly identical or you can get a respin from another outfit (e.g. CentOS).

Now Fedora Core has a different update policy to RHEL - RHEL offers the traditional "keep changes as conservative as possible" so you don't accidentally break customers stuff, whereas Fedora offers latest versions and changes galore. But why don't Red Hat offer RHEL US - for UnSupported? You get the software and the updates (via yum through a traditional mirror instead of up2date) without all this silly respin rubbish. Might keep the community onside? I suppose that the real problem is that we pay about £7.5k per annum in RHEL licences but as it never, ever goes wrong (only one call raised and that turned out to be hardware) we don't really need the support ourselves. Tough choice.

I've switched to using yahoo for searching from google. How about that for a shock?